from Hacker News

Show HN: I'm working on a open-source, self-hosted alternative to Disqus

by djyde on 4/20/21, 5:56 PM with 167 comments

  • by dariusj18 on 4/20/21, 9:29 PM

    Slightly OT but if I'm ever in need of a comprehensive list of alternatives to services, I'm just going to post that I'm building one. I just knew when I saw this post that the thread would be full of preexisting projects.

  • by lawrencechen on 4/21/21, 4:11 AM

    Neat! I checked out your source code, and if there's one comment I have, it's the way you query for comments. Currently, response times are around 300-400 ms for just 79 bytes of data. That's likely because you recursively fetch nested comments from a serverless function, which potentially has to make multiple network request to talk to the database. Coincidentally, a past Disqus employee has a great write up on the faster solution (recursive CTE): https://cra.mr/2010/05/30/scaling-threaded-comments-on-djang...

    Regardless, great work! Choosing Svelte to hit that 4.7kb mark is super sweet!

  • by mey on 4/20/21, 7:32 PM

    Coral is poorly advertised outside it's ecosystem, but should be considered. https://github.com/coralproject/talk

    See https://docs.coralproject.net/coral/v5/integrating/cms/ to get an idea of it's use.

  • by rendx on 4/20/21, 7:16 PM

    A somewhat related solution for comments is to piggyback on the Mastodon ecosystem, which I really like: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...

  • by lbriner on 4/21/21, 10:05 AM

    I wonder how many people who are using comments don't need comments. I have seen so many places where comments are enabled but even good comments are not replied to, especially when the post is from 5 years ago.

    Also, trying to ensure the correct quality of comments is time-consuming. If someone asks "Why would I use C#?", it might seem low quality and won't be published but what if someone asks "You are using C# but Go would make a lot of this easier", it might warrant publishing and even a reply but how many people really want to start a long discussion with a stranger about the merits of different languages?

  • by pentagrama on 4/20/21, 7:45 PM

    I would suggest that always show on screen the label of the input, is not a good practice put the label inside the input and make it disappear when the person start typing.

    Example: https://miro.medium.com/max/700/1*tjzXjhViDt3ArR1zUkFiRw.png

    From: https://uxdesign.cc/best-practices-for-form-design-ff5de6ca8...

    Hope can help.

  • by Tepix on 4/20/21, 8:58 PM

    When i click on "try it now", then click the browser's back button when seeing "log in with github" I and up at https://cusdis.com/dashboard and get a 500 error page.

  • by l3s2d on 4/20/21, 7:26 PM

  • by yoaviram on 4/20/21, 6:32 PM

    Nice project!

    I've been using RemarkBox for the last couple of months and like it. It's privacy respecting, hosted, pay what you want.

    https://www.remarkbox.com/

  • by jedberg on 4/20/21, 8:52 PM

    The main advantage to Disqus (and other hosted solutions) is that their spam protection applies across all comment sections. You'll never get that with an open source solution.

  • by aleksi on 4/20/21, 8:54 PM

  • by Jiejeing on 4/20/21, 7:09 PM

    Other (older) projects trying to fill a similar need :

    isso: https://github.com/posativ/isso

    juvia: https://github.com/phusion/juvia

    But cusdis looks great so far!

  • by taltman1 on 4/20/21, 9:46 PM

    I'm late to the game, but I'm surprised that no one has mentioned StaticMan yet:

    https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman

    Just uses Git(Hub|Lab) to triage and approve comments for your static sites, like Jekyll.

  • by darekkay on 4/21/21, 5:52 AM

    I'm maintaining a list of commenting systems [1]. It's great to see more alternatives coming up every few months. I've just updated the list with 3 new projects from this thread.

    [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

  • by pwdisswordfish8 on 4/20/21, 8:24 PM

    I worry about the echo chambers people are subjecting themselves to when something with applicability as general as a commenting widget requires a GitHub account to sign in. That's narrowing it down to a subset of a subset of one's audience.

  • by m00dy on 4/20/21, 6:16 PM

    Make it decentralised, it is the new black.

  • by sytse on 4/20/21, 6:54 PM

    Very cool! I would love to switch away but a Disqus import would be needed before we can do so.

  • by tyingq on 4/20/21, 7:04 PM

    The edit box doesn't seem to indicate what sorts of markup, or "url looking thing is converted to link", etc, is available. Might be good to have a little help box to explain what's allowed/supported, even if that's just text.

    Edit: I now see the "support markdown" commit. You might want a "preview" button so people can see what they have. At the moment I see only a "Post Comment" button.

    Also, does it understand the concept of canonical urls so that pages that are the same one, but with different urls, share the same comments? I searched the repo for "canonical" and didn't see anything.

  • by elric on 4/20/21, 6:24 PM

    Cuss & diss Disqus. Loving the name.

    Can I suggest you add something of an architecture diagram/flowchart od the website? Just a little something that illustrates what the frontend talks to, where the data is stored, that sort of thing?

  • by barbazoo on 4/20/21, 9:26 PM

    Disqus -> qusDis -> cusDis -> cusdis

    I hope that's not too close to the original name

  • by MayeulC on 4/20/21, 9:12 PM

    Is there a mail-based solution out there?

    Kind of like a public mailbox that you send comments to, and articles get recompiled with the comments on a static blog.

    Plus, it would be naturally threaded if your mailto: link includes a thread ID.

  • by rapnie on 4/20/21, 9:27 PM

    Great! Read here why it is needed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033052

    Disqus.. the dark commenting system.

  • by aviditas on 4/22/21, 3:09 AM

    I did some back end work and intense moderation for a large scale commenting/discussion site. I would like to chat with you about the spam /moderation 'con' you have listed in the documentation. I have a hefty set of semipolished ideas in that space that I would be happy to give to someone who can actually use them. I couldn't find a way to send you an email or message. If you are interested, feel free to reach out security at myusername .net.

  • by hutch120 on 4/20/21, 10:19 PM

    I tried out Disqus about 3 years ago, and found the API horrible... see SOF thread here. Might be worth doing a React wrapper to make it easy to understand how to integrate with frontend. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48653016/does-the-disqus...

  • by mfts0 on 4/21/21, 2:38 PM

    I'm a huge fan of the lightweight nature of Cusdis.

    I made this walk-through video of the project inclusive the deployment to Vercel and Railway:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHr0oBIA2xA

  • by transfire on 4/21/21, 5:38 AM

    Looking over the source code, it pains me to see how complicated web app development has become.

  • by rajasimon on 4/21/21, 4:08 AM

    I created a paid version here at https://blogstreak.com but I don't think it's taking off. I am planning to add marketing blogs but let's see in a month.

  • by dt3ft on 4/21/21, 9:48 AM

    The self-host documentation returns a 404: https://cusdis.com/doc#/self-host/installation

  • by 6510 on 4/20/21, 11:35 PM

    imho the most important part of comment systems is the formula to appeal bans. False positives are going to happen and you cant just randomly remove people from communities out of convenience.

  • by heofizzy on 4/20/21, 7:55 PM

    I have been tinkering about the idea of building open source disqus alternative for few months now. I guess I missed the train already:D Do you have any plans to monetise this?

  • by tanrax on 4/21/21, 5:15 AM

    Glosa, with its Disqus importer, has been around for a long time. https://github.com/glosa

  • by eatthatpie on 4/21/21, 11:56 PM

    I love this project and I'd love it more if there was a discription on landing page about WHY it is privacy-friendly (as it seems to be one of the greatest benefits).

  • by EvanKRob on 4/21/21, 11:52 AM

    Integrate it with ghost. There aren’t many options for us building communities on Ghost for commenting. Cove.chat but the experience is less than premium IMO.

  • by setum on 4/20/21, 7:58 PM

    Cool! I would like to try this out in my blog, can this be integrated with statically generated pages using jekyll?

  • by staticelf on 4/21/21, 8:26 AM

    Nice project but you should probably change the name of the service IMO.

  • by toomanyducks on 4/20/21, 6:44 PM

    What's the license? I didn't see it on the repo.

  • by zapt02 on 4/20/21, 7:27 PM

    Great use case for Svelte! How are you liking it so far?

  • by ochronus on 4/20/21, 6:46 PM

    Nice! Congrats, looks amazing

  • by spamtarget on 4/20/21, 8:56 PM

    self hosting + open source. kudos, good man

  • by FoohanFoo on 4/20/21, 6:34 PM

    Very interesting, I've been looking for this.

  • by truth_ on 4/20/21, 7:27 PM

    How can I use it on the posts in my blog hosted at GitHub pages? I use Jekyll to build my blog.

    Do you have a tutorial for that?

  • by pgt on 4/20/21, 7:54 PM

    Change the name.

  • by Dort on 4/20/21, 7:06 PM

    This looks interesting.

    I browse the WWW without JavaScript and this bricks many comment systems. Are you planning to make a widget without reliance on JavaScript?

  • by O_H_E on 4/20/21, 6:33 PM

    Not to put you down, but I think you should differentiate yourself well from Discourse (https://github.com/discourse/discourse), as it is pretty popular with the open source communities.